COVID-19’s consequences still ripple through society 5 years later

It probably never will.

The COVID-19 lockdowns disproportionately hurt service industry workers, black people, and children from low-income families. White-collar workers in knowledge industries, whose jobs shifted more easily to remote work, saw far fewer effects on their paychecks, and children from wealthier families suffered less academically and developmentally.

But the pandemic took a collective toll as well. American society is now more distrustful of institutions, less socially connected, and more divided than before March 2020.

Some of the changes brought by the pandemic lockdowns began well before the virus started spreading in Wuhan, China. People were already tuning out traditional media and turning to a more diverse array of sources for their news, for example, by the time the pandemic arrived and accelerated a massive

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